Tribunicus Potestus

We are in total agreement. It's refreshing when that happens. The only difference is that I would reverse the probabilities. My realist says that in ancient battles from the accounts that have come down to us leaders often escaped the battlefield while their armies went down to defeat. There is always the fluke that he was killed in battle but if he made it to egypt he might have dodged the bullet.

Before this thread goes any further I think it appropriate to remind everyone of the forum guidelines Specifically this bit of 2a seems appropriate: What precisely is it you wish me to defend? That an imaginary story can happen? That does not make sense. My premise "that had Boudicca thought more like Sun Tzu things may have happened differently?" Or is it each little detail in my yarn? And when I defend the point of your objection. How will I know you are satisfied? What is the standard of "proof" acceptable to you? How do we avoid another "chinese fire drill"? (for those unfamiliar with the term, chinese fire drill is when a car full of kids stops at a traffic light everyone jumps out runs 360 degrees around the car and jumps back into their seats. To great amusement).

Concise, and to the point. With a possibly winning strategy, that may have been Sun Tzu's advice rather than my more complex one. I like it!!!

Before this thread goes any further I think it appropriate to remind everyone of the forum guidelines Specifically this bit of 2a seems appropriate: I was not asking anyone to prove me wrong. In fact I ceded to your points. But If you insist on a debate I will provide a rebuttal. Forthwith.

Well there's your answer - it was never going to happen. Instead of being an intellectual thoughtful man of influence, Boudicca was an iron age hot tempered lady with a very real grudge leading men whose lives were intrinsically violent and prone to certain behavioural traits. It's pointless going on about how commanders so often fail to realise the strengths of their armies - in most cases they were well aware of them, but battlefield command is not as easy as pushing toy soldiers on a tabletop or clicking a bitmap on a computor monitor. Commanders on the field in anciemnt times had limited perspective, very little command and control, and usually fought in a manner prescribed by cultural tradition. To do otherwise may well have caused the army to weaken its morale because they were told to fight in a manner they were not comfortable with, and they would instinctively doubt a leader who did not satisfy their perceptions. You are of course correct. But have some fun. Play armchair general and see if you can come up with an alternate strategy that may have worked. I'd love to hear it. Just try and be entertaining, please. No need to be stuffy with a "what if" Thread. You might incorporate the cultural biases of the two opponents. Or what ever you like.

So, the myth is that the myth is a myth?

It should be obvious from what I've posted here and elsewhere that I do not subscribe to the view of overland routes between China and the west as a 'myth'. Duh! No wonder I couldn't understand how you could be arguing for the "myth". Boy do I feel like an idiot.

Even supposing the improbable that somehow Boudicca was touched by the gods and saw what she should do, defeating Suetonius would have availed her nothing. Trebbia, Trasimene, and Cannae did Hannibal no good. In the end Carthage was crushed. Only a grand strategic plan would have a hope of success. Her enemy in that case would be the Empire not one governor of a backwater colony. Military defeat of Rome would be impossible. So where would you fight the battle? I would see my opponent as the mind of the Emperor. What does he want? I could not deny him what he wants but perhaps I could give it to him in a way that best protects my interests. It would be a bitter pill to swallow but to win one must be ruthless even against ones own cultural bias. The outline is this analyze what the heck he wants on this god forsaken island? First send or hire spies in the capitol and try and determine how decisions are made there. Who has the emperors ear? Who does he listen to? How can we approach them? What do they want? After gathering this necessary intelligence formulate a plan. This is where it gets tough, selling the idea at home. But it is the only hope. Anyone opposing your plan must either be discredited or eliminated. This is not for the squeamish. Remember survival depends on ruthlessness. To get the Emperor to accept the plan you will have to lobby your cause through the right people, those you have already discovered in the first phase. You will have to grease a lot of palms so dig up your hoards. You will need a propaganda machine to push your version in an acceptable form among the people of Rome softening their anger. Sell Boudicca's daughters as later day Lucretias only her mother took up arms to avenge her daughters rape. Play up the dignity and righteous outrage of Boudicca comparing her to Roman women. Invent stories that show Boudicca behaving as a typical Roman Matron. How about a story where Boudicca reluctantly takes up arms with her praying to the Emperor at night hoping for him to understand. Bring the people to tears, this will make it easier for the Emperor to take a cynical route. Having prepared the ground you can then move into the next phase. You will need to determine if your plan is acceptable to the Emperor privately, before sending a formal Embassy. The broad outlines might be something like this. Sweeten the offer as much as possible, we want to tempt remember? Offer a heavy payment for the Emperors losses to date. Offer to pay indemnities to the widows and families of those killed in the unfortunate misunderstandings. Offer land for the Emperor to give to veterans from around the Empire as rewards for services rendered at no cost to the Emperor. Offer to declare the Emperor a god of Britain. Offer to swear allegiance to the Emperor. Offer a guaranteed supply of whatever the heck he wants from Britain. Tin? Gold? Etc. In return Ask for a blanket amnesty (it was just an unfortunate misunderstanding after all) Boudicca could come to Rome head dutifully bowed and kiss the Emperors feet and ask to be forgiven and he could make a great show of magnanimity and explain the wrongs were on both sides and to the thunderous applause of the Plebs wag his finger and say sternly "don't let it happen again." Turning to the crowd and stretching out his hands "Why don't we all go now and attend the lavish games being provided by the people of Britain?" [this would all have been carefully choreographed and agreed to before hand and the piles of gold already in the emperors hands] Ask for Governors of Britain to be exclusively Britons. With candidates chosen by the ruled. Subject to the Emperors approval. Ask for representation in the Senate. Ask for citizenship to be extended to all Britons. Ask for all legions in Britain to be raised from the British. Commanded by foreigners fine, but the rank and file must be local. (the British would pay all costs for raising and maintaining these legions} It might not sell but what else is there? "If you can't whip 'em, join 'em" a not so ancient american dictum "Make him an offer he can't refuse" a fictional american dictum

There are more what if's to history than actually happened; one of which is the suggestion that the 'final' battle of the Boudican Revolt occured at Mancetter. There are several other possible sites while evidence for troop build-ups in the area upon which this claim seems to have been based could equally in my eyes have been in advance of the assault on Mona. Unless and until we find mass graves and assorted equipment which can be dated to the period and tied to the Iceni in the immediate area I would be loath to make such a specific claim for Mancetter over any other possible site. But to answer your question at the end of the day Boudicca did not have either 20-20 hindsight or a copy of Sun Tzu in her back pocket so the events of the revolt worked out the way they did more or less as Tacitus recorded them. The general impression of the revolt is of an apparently widespread but still fairly localised uprising of loosely allied units but with no one overall general. While they could bring force of numbers to more or less undefended locations they could sweep all before them but when it came to a disiplined army which made the best use of the terrain and let the enemy come to it their cause was lost. Thank you. I was aware that the location is in doubt. But knowing that does not further the premise of the "what if". This was a fanciful notion prompted by my immediate reaction to reading an account of the battle and seeing the options available based solely on that cursory account. The stratagem I have used for the story came to me immediately but it took me many hours to understand why I had seen it and how to explain its basis. In reality Boudicca had no chance, she did not have the background of her opponent, culturally she was probably hampered in many ways and unable to think in ways that are effortless for you and me. But I still found it fun. The "she did not have a copy of the 'Art of War'" was really a metaphor for "she could not think like we of the 21st century." I placed myself in her situation looking at the description I read, trying to imagine that I did not have 20 - 20 knowledge of what happened and "what would I do in the same situation." But I am not an ancient Celt with no knowledge of warfare or burning desire for revenge of course. A second option would have occurred to me that she would also not have thought of and that would be the Fabian strategy. Ignore the romans in place and continue rampaging the countryside. But she would not have my knowledge of the roman war with Hannibal, nor would she understand why the Fabian strategy was such an effective response to Hannibal. Even the romans had a hard time comprehending the brilliance of it. At least until Cannae. "Attack where your enemy cannot defend, defend where your enemy cannot attack." " Second best is to attack your enemies alliances." Sun Tzu 500 B.C. Hannibal tried to apply the second but Fabius just did it right back at him. Note: The second dictum above is out of context and does not refer to the first. Perhaps you can recognize how Suetonius applied the first dictum and I just served it back at him.

You appear to conclude that some sort of direct communication of goods was in effect and not simply a spill over of excess. So where is the myth? Was it just a matter of semantics?

Then how do the middlemen make any profit? In any case, goods on the end of market chains are notoriously expensive. Exactly. As long as there is no saturation.

I am sorry I did not answer this question directly. The answer in no. No matter how many links you have in a market to market model the price will remain low. On the length question yes the longer the expedition the higher the aggregate costs. No matter how much competition you have neither can afford to sell below cost. At least not indefinitely. I point to the failure of Texas Instruments to monopolize the digital watch, calculator, and home computer industries by selling below costs to eliminate the competition. They lost billions in futile attempts.

I reread your post and saw that you said Suetonius if anyone took the above advice and that is exactly right. He knew his own forces and he knew the Celts. What I conjured was a Boudicca he did not know, one with a copy of "The Art of War".

Thank you. You raise many fine points. I think I was primarily pointing out the difference a leader makes to the outcome of battle and how it is more important to defeat your enemies plans than to defeat his forces. Sorry to say, but I take a different position on Sun Tzu. British Captain B. H. Liddell Hart whom you may know of with J. F. C. Fuller as the fathers of modern warfare. When Captain Hart travelled to Nationalist China to speak to the Chinese military academy he was told that his works were studied religiously there. He said to them "you already have the best teacher, Sun Tzu." It was in reading Captain Hart's work that I first became familiar with Sun Tzu back in the 60s long before he became a household name. You are probably right that opposing commanders usually know (understand) their opponent and that would explain why most battles and wars are indecisive. It is when one side does not and I think in the case of Boudicca she did not understand Suetonius that massive disasters can occur.

Like I have said before we don't disagree. You take the words from my mouth. [ in case you are unfamiliar with that phrase. It means you say what I might say before I can say it.]

I had hoped that my example story would be self-explanatory. But my hopes have been dashed. If we revisit the story of the islanders the first part represents the pure market-to-market version. Where movement of goods occurs only when a saturation point is reached. You can see where the pressure points are. Sparky is in a position of strength as a buyer, she can and will, negotiate a lower price from the people of Alpha Island. They will accept this because their own market is saturated. However when she tries to market her goods on Beta Island she must contend with Jarvis. Jarvis will try and undercut her, and she must respond in kind. That is the second point of downward pressure. The second part of the story I over simplified. Which is the model that is driven not by saturation but by the hope of higher profits. In that model one tries to outreach the competition and seek higher profits. In that case what happens even if Jarvis were to catch on and tries to compete at the more distant island Gamma they both will incur mounting costs which will force the bottom price upwards. With a farther reach will come fewer competitors and higher costs both pushing prices upwards. I know using the "drug" trade as a comparison is distasteful but try and imagine for example the cocaine model. We all know from the news and movies more or less how it works. Cocaine comes from Columbia or thereabouts it passes two choke points, one in Panama and one is Mexico. But it follows a more or less forward route to the U.S. where the cash is. Try and imagine a market-to-market model with Cocaine only moving from Columbia after the market becomes saturated there and spilling into a neighboring country until that country is saturated and then to the next. By the time it reaches the U.S. it will be a surplus good and the price would be low. This is not the model the drug lords have chosen. There is nothing to say that both models can not exists simultaneously with the number of steps existing between the east and the west. But you will then have upward and downward pressures at different parts of the chain. Both models are possible but one leads to higher prices the other to lower. Bear in mind I am not saying one model is more or less profitable for the originator only that the end user will pay a different price. In the U.S. we have a phenomena known as the 99 cent store. The model illustrates the point of downward pressure. The 99 cent stores purchase overstocks and items otherwise unsell-able at their full price and sell them for next to nothing or more precisely 99 cents.

What would happen in a cloud model similar to the drug trade? [if the use of the term drug bothers you, substitute bananas or whatever you like, I just picked it up as the first thing that came to mind for unregulated trade] Using the same hypothetical chain of Islands. Suppose that Sparky had an inspiration. Why not avoid competing with Jarvis in the first place and go on to Gamma island? There she would sell her coconuts at a high markup, perhaps to Bippo's sister Zippo. Zippo then takes Sparky's idea to heart and takes them on to Delta island. Since she paid a high price for her coconuts she would need to recoup her costs so the price would go up. So there you have it. I am not taking either side in the question. I am approaching it Tabula Rasa. Is there a simple way to test each hypothesis and there is. Even if we knew nothing about trade between Rome and China, if there was a black box with China at one end and Rome at the other we could still determine the method goods took to arrive. All we would need is the price at both ends. And the relative saturation between.

Please note that this is on topic. Rather than try and explain piecemeal what I mean by downward pressure, I will use a simplified story to illustrate my point. There are a people living on a string of islands. The heebee Jeebee people. On the first island Alpha island people have discovered coconuts. At first they are thrilled by this new item and eat to their hearts content. But they have more coconuts than they can consume. A man/or woman paddles over from Beta Island, let us call him Jarvis. Jarvis tries out the coconut and realizes that he could sell these back on Beta. The Alpha people are now sick of the coconuts and sell some of them for a starfish. Jarvis knowing the Betas have no coconuts sells them for huge sums of fish. Sparky is a clever girl from Beta and thinks to herself "I could be rich too if only I had coconuts". She paddles across to Alpha and to her amazement sees that the people are up to their necks in coconuts. It dawns on her that Jarvis has been getting away with "murder". The natives of Alpha offer to sell Sparky coconuts in return for a starfish. Sparky refuses and says she will give a half-starfish to which the Alphas soon capitulate (better half a starfish than another one of those coconuts). Upon returning to Beta she tries to sell for the price being demanded by Jarvis. Jarvis being no fool and realizing he now has competition cuts his price in half. Sparky not to be outdone and knowing how little she acquired the coconuts for enters a price cutting war with Jarvis. Eventually driving the price down to sensible levels. At some point Beta too is saturated with coconuts and someone named Bippo arrives from island Gamma and the process begins all over again.

So we agree? This feels like two blind men at opposite ends of an elephant arguing over what it is. I don't see how we disagree. If the premise of the question is that there was no "route 66" running from Beijing to Rome, I have never seen anyone take this stand. I have always seen the "silk route" described as an amorphous cloud that took many paths to reach its markets. I may have misunderstood your Market-to-Market model as implying a discontinuous process by which goods moved east to west and visa versa. But if I was not incorrect in that assumption allow me to explain the problems with that model. You could well buy discounted surplus items and then bring them home and charge outrageous mark ups. The problem is that your competitor has a great deal of room to under cut you. Competition will drive the prices downward. If on the other-hand we use the drug market model the costs of bringing the goods to market will keep the prices moving ever upward. There are simple experiments to illustrate one of the problems with a strictly Market to Market approach. Take 4 household cleaning sponges and line them up end to end. Using a sprinkling can such as that used to water house plants. Fill it with water and slowly pour water into the first sponge. The first sponge represents China and its market. The second is India. The third Persia. The fourth Rome. In order for the water to reach the fourth sponge you have to drench the first sponge and keep pouring profusely until water can reach the fourth sponge. Does this fit the evidence? I don't know. But in order to prove a strictly market to market model you need to show that it does. You also need to show a downward pressure in price not an upward movement.

I am sorry, I did not mean that this was the temple but just that it was in the right area. I was unclear and it is my fault.

I have often wondered why something so simple as the square which requires no new technology all you need are pikes, and does not require a great deal of training since the swiss employed it first with citizen militias was not adopted by the greeks. Why would you line up in a single group such as a phalanx? Perhaps since it was often formed from different city states working together there was the desire to avoid one group appearing more brave than another that a single wall facing the enemy was politically more acceptable. Perhaps the hierarchal nature of greek society demanded placement of one social group in the front line and others progressively to the rear. The idea that rear groups could become front groups may have been an anathema. As would side ranks becoming intermixed in a side-facing defense or advance. This type of thinking may have blinded the greeks to the obvious concept. While the more democratically thinking swiss were not culturally handicapped in this way. Perhaps it was a religious problem. Greek soldiers expected if they were killed in battle to be carried off on their shields. The square makes a shield superfluous and an unnecessary encumbrance. The psychological difficulty in abandoning their shields may have been too much. For those unfamiliar with the pike square, with the testudo which was described as a tortoise due to it's all around protection one might compare the pike square to a hedge-hog or a porcupine. The roman army was the product of a much more mobile society. The later romans were not as hampered by the rigid stratification of the greeks and were able to adapt their armies much more readily to new demands. After the reforms of Marius in particular the roman army began to resemble a modern army and could rapidly adapt to changes in both strategy and tactics as the divine Julius shows us in his gallic campaign altering from a very aggressive approach at Avaricum to the defensive-offense at Alesia. The conquest of Greece was an inevitable by-product of these differences in attitudes. The practical will always defeat the dogmatic in the long run [ last part removed to protect sensitivities , I did not mean to step on toes, or cherished notions, rather to simply give a supporting statement for the last sentence in the previous paragraph. I took the premise of the question seriously, "Could the Greeks have beaten the Romans" and proffered a way in which it might have been done. Speculating further on why it was not done. There is no need to ban me, I will refrain from entering the discussion. ]

No it does not make sense. On the other hand Morgan Freeman playing a nubian makes little sense as he clearly has a good degree of "white" blood. It can not be argued that egyptians do not have a sizable amount of mixed blood. One has but to look at Anwar Sadat. There are many paintings from the pharaonic times right through the roman occupation of egypt that depict nubians. There are also many shades in between in the depictions. The whole question is a bit silly. Here in the U.S. Obama is always referred to as a "black" president when he is as much "white" as he is black in terms of his parentage. If one could not see him but only judge him with blind eyes one would have to conclude he were a "white" american, culturally you can't get any more "white" american than he is. He is very different to my eyes than his wife in terms of culture, in speech, and in attitudes she clearly bears the mark of african-american sub-culture. I argue this with acquaintances all the time. On what basis can you call him definitively "black"? With that in mind under no circumstances would I call Cleopatra "black". Even if her father were 100 percent nubian she could at most be described as mixed. Culturally she would be "the Queen of Egypt" and that's that.

This must be it. My link Amarysia Atemis.

Is there a tentative parallel in the way the BNP seem to hero worship Boudica for giving the Roman Invaders a good kick where it hurts (Colchester)? Does anyone else see the irony that the ancestors of the (presumably predominantly Anglo-Saxon) BNP where likely the ones that kicked Boudica's Celtic descendants out of the country? That kind of irony is par for the course on this side of the atlantic. Buffalo nickel anyone? I could spend all night with a list of such things. But I will spare you.